How life events shape personality development and environmental influence

¶ … Life-Changing

The event I will write about took place at a lake near our house. It was summer and I had finished middle school and was heading into high school in the fall. Before describing the incident at the lake, I should explain something about my middle school experiences, because they relate to the incident at the lake.

During middle school I had been shoved on occasion and verbally taunted by a couple bullies in the schoolyard a few times a week. In my 7th grade experience and in my 8th grade experience I had been part of a little group of friends that was the target of these bullies. We were physically threatened and verbally harassed once or twice a week. The students I was in a group with were creative kids, taking part in plays, writing and reciting poetry, and two of my friends were strong Christians and wore the Christian cross on silver chains around their necks.

So apparently the two bullies saw us as easy targets (they would walk by and spit on our shoes or call us "weirdo's" or "sissies") because we never fought back, we just walked away from them when they approached us. One very nice 8th grade boy, Eric, who was as big or bigger than the bullies but also shy like us, stuck up for our group one day. There were four of us sitting in the grass, eating our sandwiches on the soccer field during lunch period, practicing our lines for the play we had written. One of the bullies came over, reached down and took an apple from one of my friends.

He started to take a bite out of it when Eric stood up and said, "Give that back to my friend!" This was what the bully wanted Eric to do, and it gave the bully the excuse to shove Eric to the ground and tell him, "Butt out idiot, this is not your problem." The bully took a big bite out of the apple then threw it in a trashcan, watching closely to see if we saw him do that. We did. He left us alone for a few days after that. We reported that particular bully to the vice principal but she just advised us to "Stay away from him." But if he "actually harms you or hits you, I want to know about that," she added.

Meanwhile, it is the summer before high school. I had taken swimming lessons when I was younger and had always felt very comfortable in the water, although I was not a lifeguard and I had not been trained in rescue techniques. On this particular day, I was practicing diving off the end of the pier. My little fantasy was to be like the Olympic divers, to slip into the water without a big splash, and my feet just right as I went into the water. It was a deep lake and just a dozen or so yards from the end of the pier the lake dropped to 60 or 70 feet deep, and the water was really cold.

What actually happened that affected my life.

I was standing on the end of the pier, ready to dive in again, when I heard a voice yelling "Help! Help!" I couldn't see who it was but it was a person about 40 yards away and he was thrashing in the water with his back to me. I dove in and swam near to the struggling swimmer, who was trying to tread water but he wasn't doing well. He would sink below the surface then his arms flailing, he would resurface in a panic. As I said, I never had any lifeguard experience but I had watched lifeguards in training and had seen how a lifeguard trainee would put his right arm around the chest of the person needing to be rescued. While paddling in to safety with the left hand and pumping feet in the water, the lifeguards pulled the struggling person along the surface, asking them to stop flailing hands and just try to float.

So that's what I did. Without thinking about what I should do, I put my right arm around his chest and under the armpits and dragged him towards the shore. He fought me at first then stopped. He had swallowed a lot of water and was choking. Halfway to shore I realized this was one of the bullies that had intimidated and harassed me during middle school. My first thought was, oh my God, I'm rescuing the very person that made my life miserable, maybe I should have let him drown. My second thought was, let's just get to the ladder leading up to the pier and he can go on his own. We got safely to the ladder, and one of his bully friends was standing on the pier and helped him up. The two of them went off the pier and sat down in the sand. I walked over to them and asked if the rescued bully was okay. He said "Thank you so much, I'm not a good swimmer at all…"

Among my friends and others who saw this situation, I was heroic, brave, and courageous, although I didn't see what I did that way at the time. The bully saw me down at the park playing Frisbee a week or so after the situation at the lake, and he came over and thanked me for pulling him up out of the water. He also said how sorry he was for having been such a pain in the neck to me and my friends. I was still mad at him but something in the expression on his face told me he really was sorry. Probably his mom or dad told him to apologize to me after they heard the story, I'm not sure. We shook hands. I still didn't totally trust him, but I had been taught by my parents to accept people as being sincere until it was proven otherwise. I am a product of my environment. My parents were Christians and taught me and my brother to be kind to people, to give them the benefit of the doubt; this shaped my personality, not the incident at the lake.